This is a paid article which your subscription is allowing you to read.

New polling* from The Common Sense and the Social Research Foundation shows that the share of voters who say South Africa is going in the right direction is greater now than it was in 2022: 19% in July 2026, up from 11% in July 2022, a rise larger than the polling's margin of error. Over the same four years the share saying the country is going in the wrong direction fell from 83% to 72%. The mood was brightest in September 2024, three months after the Government of National Unity (GNU) took office, when 32% said the country was on the right track. It has come down from that high, but since early 2025 it has held between 15% and 21%. Most voters still think the country is heading the wrong way, 72% against 19% in July, but fewer than four years ago. The chart below shows the share of voters who say South Africa is going in the right direction and the share of voters who say it is going in the wrong direction in each of the ten rounds since July 2022.

*The figures come from ten Social Research Foundation Market Surveys of registered voters, each a national telephone poll with results weighted to the voting population. The rounds were: July 2022 (3 204 respondents, design effect 3.17), March 2023 (1 517 respondents, design effect 2.32), October 2023 (1 412 respondents, design effect 3.06), April 2024 (1 835 respondents, design effect 3.19), September 2024 (1 204 respondents, design effect 1.34), February 2025 (1 004 respondents, design effect 2.01), June 2025 (1 004 respondents, design effect 2.01), November 2025 (1 002 respondents, design effect 1.76), March 2026 (2 222 respondents, design effect 3.27) and July 2026 (2 214 respondents, design effect 3.79).